The open-plan office, while providing a desireable working environment, brings with it the need for acoustic controls. The majority of such offices are furnished with workstations built from manufactured partitions in various modular heights and widths, assembled into useable arrangements. These partitions may provide some amount of visual privacy, but they do not usually furnish much acoustic privacy. Often, both partition surfaces and ceiling surfaces are covered with or made from sound absorbing material, although this solution is frequently inadequate, hence the need for additional sound absorptive surfaces and enclosures. Modern acoustical principles suggest that additional material be located strategically at or near the source of annoying sound. Also, such additional sound absorbers should give the user a psycho-acoustical sense of enclosure, privacy and comfort in additon to an actual reduction in the transmission of sound via reflection to adjacent workspaces.
At present, the installation of additional acoustically absorptive material in a workspace involves expensive labor and a physical alteration of existing surfaces; no direct method of strategically locating individual baffles is in common use. The present invention intends to address all of the foregoing issues.
In its preferred embodiment, the invention consists of lengths of sound absorbing tubular material (such as flexible urethane or the like) attached in a frame or structure, adjacent along their length to create a planar form with a "scalloped" cross-section. This presents a surface area 57% greater than if the surface were flat, thereby enhancing absorbing efficiency. A variety of hardware is used to hold the tubes to structural members and, in the preferred form of the device, to anchor the tubular assembly directly to slotted standards which are virtually universally installed in manufactured office partitions. Other configurations of the device use alternate hardware for wall mount, table mount, ceiling suspension or other attachment to horizontal or vertical surfaces. Tubular sections are easy to fabricate and assemble, and are lightweight when appropriate flexible absorptive foams are used. This permits simple mounting and location in a large variety of situations.